The Path of Ruin

Across the southern sea stood the island kingdom of Lankā, and it was no mean or squalid place, but a city of gold, magnificent, its towers bright, its palaces heaped with the plunder of the three worlds, the seat of the mightiest power of darkness that the age had known. And in the heart of it, on a throne that the gods themselves feared to challenge, sat Rāvaṇa.

He was the lord of the rākshasas, the ten-headed king, and his power was almost beyond reckoning. Through fierce penances in his youth he had won boons that made him nearly invulnerable, secure against gods and demons and every celestial power; in his pride he had not troubled to ask protection against mere men, holding men too far beneath him to matter, and in that omission, though he did not know it, his doom was already written.

He had conquered heaven and humbled its gods; he had made the powers of the cosmos tremble; he ruled his golden island in a splendour and an arrogance that no one in all the worlds had dared to challenge. And into his golden court, one day, his mutilated sister came shrieking for vengeance.

Shūrpaṇakhā flung herself before Rāvaṇa’s throne, disfigured, bleeding still, and she made her appeal, and she was cunning in the making of it, for she knew her brother, and she knew that the surest way to move him was not through pity for her wound alone but through two things nearer to his heart: his pride, and his lust.

She told him of the insult first, the disfigurement of his own sister by human hands, the affront to the honour of the demon race, the destruction of Khara and Dūshaṇa and the whole fourteen thousand by a single human archer in the Daṇḍaka. This last was calculated to alarm him, for a man who could destroy fourteen thousand rākshasas alone was a power that even Rāvaṇa could not simply ignore. But she did not dwell on the danger, for she did not wish to frighten her brother away from vengeance; she wished to inflame him toward it.

And so she turned quickly to the second and sharper goad.

She told him of Sītā. And here she poured out all her art, describing the beauty of Rāma’s wife in terms designed to set Rāvaṇa’s lust ablaze. There was a woman in that forest, she told him, of a beauty beyond anything in the three worlds, beyond the loveliest of Rāvaṇa’s own queens, beyond the celestial nymphs, a woman whose beauty was such that she was a fit ornament only for the greatest of kings, wasted utterly on a mere exiled human wandering the woods. Sītā, Rāma’s wife.

And she, Shūrpaṇakhā, had tried to win this jewel for her brother, and it was in that very attempt that she had been disfigured. Take her, she urged. Avenge our family’s honour and possess the most beautiful woman in the world in a single stroke. Carry off Sītā, and you strike at the human who destroyed our kin, and you gain a treasure worthy of your greatness. This is the vengeance that will satisfy both your honour and your desire.

Now there was one among Rāvaṇa’s counsellors, a demon named Akampana, or by some tellings it was Shūrpaṇakhā herself who reasoned thus, who gave Rāvaṇa a piece of strategic advice that shaped the whole course of what followed. Rāma, this counsel ran, cannot be defeated in open battle. He is too strong; he has destroyed fourteen thousand of us single-handed; to meet him in direct combat is to invite destruction. But there is another way to destroy him, a surer way.

His strength is bound up with his love for Sītā; she is his heart, his weakness, the one thing whose loss would break him. Do not fight Rāma. Steal his wife. Take Sītā from him by cunning, and you will break his spirit without ever crossing his sword; you will destroy him more surely by robbing him of what he loves than any army could destroy him in battle. Aim not at his strength but at his heart.

It was shrewd and it was wicked, and it appealed to everything base in Rāvaṇa, to his lust for the woman, to his desire for vengeance, and to his cowardice, for it offered him the prize without the danger, the theft without the fight. And Rāvaṇa, in his pride and his desire, resolved upon it. He would carry off Sītā. He would take by cunning the woman his sister had described, and satisfy his lust and his vengeance together, and break the human who had dared to injure his family.

Let us look, for a moment, into the ruin that was working itself out in Rāvaṇa’s soul, for the story means us to understand him, not merely to condemn him. Rāvaṇa was not a fool, and he was not, in the ordinary sense, weak. He was mighty, learned, a great king, a devotee of Shiva, a master of the scriptures, possessed of gifts and powers that made him one of the towering figures of the age. And all of it was being poured down the drain of a single ungoverned appetite.

His lust for a woman he had never seen, kindled by his sister’s description, was leading him, step by deliberate step, toward an act that would destroy him and his city and his whole race. He had every advantage, every power, every reason to leave the exiles alone and keep his golden kingdom safe. And he was throwing it all away, knowingly, for the sake of possessing a woman who was another man’s wife and who would never, could never, be his.

This is the deepest lesson of Rāvaṇa, and the story returns to it again and again: that the greatest strength avails nothing against the enemy within, that a man may conquer heaven and be undone by his own desire, that the ruin of the mighty comes most often not from a stronger foe but from the ungoverned wanting in their own hearts.

Rāvaṇa was setting his own foot upon the path of ruin, and he was doing it with his eyes open, choosing the theft that would doom him over the restraint that would have saved him, because his appetite was stronger than his wisdom, and that is the oldest and the deadliest of all the failures of the great.

There was a dark and plotting atmosphere in that golden court as the design took shape. Rāvaṇa’s fury and lust hardened into a plan, and the plan required an instrument, for Rāvaṇa could not simply seize Sītā by force while Rāma and Lakshmaṇa guarded her; he had seen what Rāma’s bow could do. He needed cunning; he needed a trick to draw the brothers away from her, to leave her for a moment unguarded, so that he could snatch her and be gone before her protectors could prevent it.

And for such a trick he needed a particular kind of servant, a demon skilled in sorcery and illusion, one who could take a false shape and play a false part.

And Rāvaṇa knew exactly whom he would compel to the task, though the demon in question would beg and warn and try with all his terrified soul to turn his master from the path. He would summon Mārīcha, the sorcerer, the shape-changer, the one demon in all Lankā who had felt the power of Rāma’s arrows before and lived, and who knew, as Rāvaṇa in his blind pride did not, exactly what doom the lord of the demons was preparing to bring down upon them all.